I’ll be heading off to Asia one way sometime in mid January with a laptop (that I have yet to buy… there’s one for the list), a backpack full of the usual backpacker stuff, a bit of money and no intention to return to the rat race anytime soon.
I look forward to working on the road but I’d rather keep it to about 2 hours a day of content updates rather than spending a lot longer building sites from scratch, debugging current sites and sorting out all the things I’ve avoided for too long. I don’t mind doing these things on a rainy day in London but when I’m at some beachy location with the sun shining and the beer flowing the chances of my getting more than a few hours a day of work done are pretty minimal. Actually I can guarantee it’s not going to happen.
That means I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m working full time at the moment and attempting to maintain a social life so things will be busy but I’ve really got to get cracking if I’m going to have the level of freedom I want once I hit the road.
So in an effort to motivate myself and sort my thoughts out I’ve come up with a list of all the things I’d like to get done before I leave for Asia in the mid January 2008:
- Add more content and photos to my London site – I’ll be moving away soon so it’s silly not to take advantage of living here while I can. I’ll probably lose interest in the site once I move away in mid December so adding to it as much as possible is a priority.
- Overhaul my Working Holiday site – I’m working on overhauling this site because it’s not performing nearly as well as I think it can. I’ve got big things in mind that will take a lot of research and I’m putting a lot of care into the design so this one’s a biggie.
- Move my final site to Dreamhost – I’m currently shelling out around $100/year to host one of my niche sites with Powweb which is pointless since I can whack it onto Dreamhost for free. The problem is that I have a forum and need to sort out moving the database over. Might sound simple to some but I’m a bit tech challenged. I need to work this out at some point to save myself $100. Once I do this all of my sites will be with Dreamhost which is cost effective and will make managing my sites a bit easier.
- Revive Travoholic.com – This is my oldest site, Google loves it and it performs well but, lets be honest, it’s crap. I’ve neglected it for way too long because with nearly 1000 pages it’s pretty unruly and undergoing an overhaul is a bit intimidating. There’s a lot of good information hidden in there and I think the site has a lot of potential, I just need to devise some way to tap into it. This is a huge project that I might not get to. I’m think I’m afraid of my website.
- Set up a travel blog – I think the internet needs another travel blog. Ok that’s a lie but I’m going to put mine out there anyways because it will be great. Ok that’s a lie too. I want one just because.
- Join more affiliate programs – While I’ve acknowledged that affiliate programs are the way forward, I have yet to get off of my arse to do anything about it. I need to spend some quality time scouring the internet for programs that are good matches for my sites.
I haven’t put increasing traffic or finding new income streams or stuff like that as goals because those are the sorts of things that I expect to be doing on the road. I guess I’m focusing on behind the scenes things, the infrastructure, and once I’ve got things how I want them I’ll focus my efforts on the other stuff.
I still expect to build the occasional new site after I leave if I come up with a good idea but I don’t want site construction to be the bulk of my work abroad so here’s hoping I can manage to achieve my goals!
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